Square Presents: The Journey of Android Engineers

Join us on Thursday, February 18th for the third edition of our Square Presents Series. It’ll be a night of discussion and lightning talks from Square and our friends at Udemy and Highlight. The event starts with lightning talks from John Rodriguez, Effie Barak, Eric Burke, and Christina Lee. The overall focus is on technical growth and covers transitioning to Android, becoming a better interviewer, and exploring new technologies.

We’ll finish the night with a panel discussion moderated by our very own Pierre-Yves Ricau.

Registration

You can see full event details and register on our registration page. Space is limited and this is sure to fill up quickly! If you’re not in the Bay Area, you won’t miss out; we’ll record the event and share the videos here soon.

Schedule:

John Rodriguez: A Tale of Two Daggers

For the past three years, Square Register for Android has leveraged Dagger to wire up Java objects. However, Register’s scope hierarchy and complexity are increasing and pushing the limits on Dagger. In this lightning talk, John highlights how and why the Register team incrementally migrated the Android app to Dagger 2.

John Rodriguez is an Android engineer at Square working on Square’s free point-of-sale app. Prior to Square, John worked at Amplify on their award-winning Android tablet platform for K-12 education and at Major League Baseball on iOS and Java server-side applications.

Effie Barak: Transitioning from .Net to Android

After 10 years at Microsoft, Effie made the transition from Windows Phone to Android development. In this talk, she shares her experience: What was easy to pick up, what was hard, what was baffling, and what was thrilling. In a world where Android developers are in high demand and developers change stacks all the time, what does it take to make the switch and how can we help more people have an easier transition.

Effie Barak is an Android developer on the mobile team at Udemy. She began working as a C# developer 10 years ago, but most recently became a mobile developer 4 years ago. After moving to San Francisco in 2013, she worked on the Slack for Windows Phone app.

Eric Burke: Interrupting Interview Bias

We all want to hire amazing software engineers and build the best teams possible. With this in mind, it’s important to recognize that our own biases can lead us to flawed interviewing and hiring decisions. “Unconscious bias” refers to behaviors that are triggered without our awareness, leading to quick judgments and assessments of people and situations based on our background, cultural environment, and personal experiences. In this lightning talk, Eric shares practical tips that all of us can use to interrupt bias before, during, and after interviews.

Eric Burke is an Engineering Manager at Square with more than 20 years experience. He co-created Square Register for Android, leads Square’s QA and test engineering teams, and has interviewed over 600 software engineers. He developed and teaches a class on unconscious bias as well as a class on interview techniques. He’s also an avid woodworker and you can find him on Twitter at@burke_eric.

Christina Lee: Redux-ing UI bugs: Borrowing the Best of the Web to Make Native Better

Between React, Cycle.js, Flux, and Redux, many interesting UI related architectures, frameworks, and libraries are gaining traction on the web. While React Native, a port of one such concept, is gaining popularity, it is not a feasible choice for every company. In this lightning talk, Christina covers how the engineers at Highlight built a Redux-like framework in Kotlin to simplify state management and reduce bugs in challenging UI components, all without having to reinvent their Android app or sacrifice hard won expertise.

Christina Lee is currently the Android lead at Highlight. In addition to trying to convince the world to use Kotlin on a daily basis, she also enjoys building beautiful UIs, extolling the virtues of Rx, and reading well documented APIs.

*Please note that advanced registration is required to attend this event and only registered guests will be able to attend. This event could potentially reach capacity, so we recommend showing up on time. Check in closes promptly at 6:00 PM.